Sen. Bernie Moreno is expected to introduce a bill in the Senate on Monday sanctioning Canada’s government over wildfire smoke drifting into the United States. The text builds a sanctions regime around a presidential determination that can trigger on its own if left unmade.
Within 30 days of enactment, the president must determine, through the EPA administrator in consultation with the secretaries of state, agriculture, the interior, and commerce, whether Canadian wildfire smoke caused a “material transboundary smoke event” in the US during the prior 12 months and whether Canada’s government failed to respond adequately.
An affirmative finding gets published in the Federal Register and triggers the sanctions. If the president doesn’t decide by the deadline, the bill deems the finding affirmative anyway, and the determination must be revisited at least every 180 days for as long as it stays in effect.
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The bill directs the president to compile a public list of “responsible foreign persons,” a category that includes anyone serving as Canada’s prime minister, any current or former Cabinet member, deputy minister or agency head, and senior officials over forestry, land management, wildfire response, emergency management, environmental protection, air-quality monitoring or natural resources.
It also covers anyone who knowingly ordered or facilitated policies that worsened a smoke event, concealed information about a wildfire’s severity or path, or refused US requests for assistance, plus immediate family members who knowingly benefited financially from that conduct. Everyone on the list has their US property and interests blocked under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and becomes inadmissible to the United States, with any current visa automatically revoked.
Three sanctions apply automatically once triggered: a ban on US government contracts with Canada’s government, a cutoff of Export-Import Bank financing for Canadian government exports, and a directive for US representatives at international financial institutions to oppose loans benefiting Canada’s government.
The president must then select at least three more from a menu of six, prohibiting US banks from lending to Canada’s government, blocking Americans from buying newly issued Canadian government debt, blocking new purchases of equity in Canadian state-owned entities, restricting imports from those entities, restricting new US investment in them, or freezing their US property outright.
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Section 9 expresses a nonbinding sense of Congress that the Secretary of State should consider declaring 16 categories of Canadian diplomatic personnel persona non grata, including the ambassador, the deputy chief of mission, several minister counselors, the defense attaché, the consuls general in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and New York, and any other diplomat whose duties touch environmental policy or wildfire response.
No replacement diplomat in those roles could present credentials until the president certifies that air quality in affected US communities has stayed below an AQI of 100 for 90 straight days.
The bill exempts humanitarian goods, medicine, wildfire-response assistance and disaster relief from its sanctions, and lets the president issue case-by-case waivers on national security or humanitarian grounds. It states outright that nothing in the act authorizes military force against Canada.
Sanctions terminate once the president certifies 90 days without a qualifying smoke event and confirms Canada has adopted a credible wildfire-prevention plan, and snap back if smoke events resume and Canada again fails to respond.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has pushed back on the idea that Canadian mismanagement caused the fires, arguing at a press conference that the United States has obstructed clean energy development, particularly wind power, and that climate responsibility extends to Washington as well. Four Republican House members from Michigan wrote to Carney’s government separately, saying they were done accepting apologies in place of action.
Canadian and American wildfire scientists largely reject the premise that better forest management would have prevented this year’s fires. Rebecca Saari, an environmental engineering professor at the University of Waterloo, said climate change has driven the rise in wildfire activity across both countries.
When there was a national emergency the US used to send help. Now it seeks to “declare war” on false pretence.
A review of @anniedufour99’s post with some key nuances:
A real draft U.S. sanctions bill exists. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) released text for the CANADA FIRE Act,… https://t.co/nWBEqeEwkf pic.twitter.com/bRHV0lVuBq
— Paul Stewart II (@PaulStewartII) July 18, 2026
Jen Beverly, a wildland fire professor at the University of Alberta, told the BBC that fires in Canada’s boreal forest are notoriously hard to contain once started, and that “we’re seeing more of those because of climate change.”
President Donald Trump and Carney sat together Sunday at the World Cup final in New Jersey, alongside Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and FIFA President Gianni Infantino. Speaking to reporters afterward at Joint Base Andrews, Trump said he pressed Carney directly on the smoke, saying, “I told him, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air. Our air has been poisoned.” He raised the possibility of Canada paying damages or facing new tariffs, though he didn’t specify what legal authority he’d use to impose them.
.@POTUS says he spoke with Canadian PM Mark Carney today about the wildfires:
“I told him, ‘You gotta stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air.’ Our air has been poisoned… If we can help them, we’ll help them — but maybe they should pay us some damages.” https://t.co/eMMQZnXtOG pic.twitter.com/ELxCgAH589
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 20, 2026
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